The use of digital substations has been increasing. Differences between digital substations and conventional substations can include a reduction in wiring between components of a substation (such as transformers, circuit breakers, protection relays, and so forth) and sharing of information among multivendor devices to provide interoperability of the devices.
Operations of the components of a digital substation can be automated using merging units (MUs) or process interface units (PIUs) and Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs). The IEDs can be programmed to monitor, control, and protect the substation components. A process bus, such as an Ethernet network, can be used to organize communications between IEDs and the MUs/PIUs.
Conventional standards can include requirements for physical security and cyber security of equipment in a switchyard of a digital substation. Meeting the requirements may require a certain engineering process for configuration of IEDs and a process bus. Any reconfiguration or maintenance of equipment of the digital substation may be expensive and time consuming.
Additional measures may be needed to ensure reliability of communications between IEDs and the substation components. Conventional solutions for providing the reliability of the communications may be based on parallel redundancy protocol (PRP) or High-availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) protocol. However, the parallel redundancy for the PRP or HSR may be provided using similar Ethernet switched networks, which can be prone to similar failure modes associated with packet switching techniques.